I notice, for example, that signatories to the Kyoto treaty are meeting in Montreal this week – maybe in the unused Olympic stadium – to discuss “progress” on “meeting” their “goals”. Canada remains fully committed to its obligation to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions by six per cent of its 1990 figure by 2008.

That’s great to know, isn’t it? So how’s it going so far?

Well, by the end of 2003, Canada’s greenhouse-gas emissions were up 24.2 per cent.

Meanwhile, how are things looking in the United States? As you’ll recall, in a typically “pig-headed and blinkered” (Independent) act that could lead to the entire planet becoming “uninhabitable” (Michael Meacher), “Polluter Bush” (Daily Express), “this ignorant, short-sighted and blinkered politician” (Friends of the Earth), rejected the Kyoto treaty. Yet somehow the “Toxic Texan” (everybody) has managed to outperform Canada on almost every measure of eco-virtue.

How did that happen?

Actually, it’s not difficult. Signing Kyoto is nothing to do with reducing “global warming” so much as advertising one’s transnational moral virtue. America could reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions by 87 per cent and Canada could increase them by 673 per cent and the latter would still be a “good citizen of the world” (in the Prime Minister’s phrase) while “Polluter Bush” would still be in the dog house, albeit a solar-powered one.

And, wasn’t one of the reasons London was awarded the games the cost that they promised they would cost? Couldn’t the IOC now conceivably sue for breach of contract, and France then sue to be awarded it instead, after suing Britain as well for falsifying thingies in order to detrimentally affect the French economy or something? I mean, when you say something is going to cost a certain something, even if you are a government, does no one think it’s just a little strange that it doubles in cost within five months? I mean, really.